ASU Herberger College School of Art Faculty:
2006-2007 Exhibition

April 14 through September 9, 2007

DAN COLLINS

Dan Collins
Drowning Phoenix, 2007
Digital ink-jet print
24 x 48"
Courtesy of the artist with technical assistance by Sky Asay

Derived in part from real world 3-D data, Drowning Phoenix represents the erasure of central Phoenix by a flood event of epochal proportions. It continues the investigation of “water in the desert” that the artist explored in his earlier project, Flooding Phoenix.

The image was created by importing real-world, 3-D satellite models downloaded from the U.S. Geologic Service into a suite of commercially available computer applications. After “stitching” the data sets together using the application 3DEM, a rendering package called Terragen 2  was used to create the visual effects.

Terragen allows the user to adjust algorithms, sets of rules, for landscape and atmospheric effects such as cloud cover, water, vegetation and sun angles.  In this beta version of Terragen 2, a user can import external-object data such as houses and trees. Trees were downloaded from a company called Xfrog. A single house was modeled by the artist in Maya, a 3-D modeling and animation software.  These “instances” were then imported as “distributed populations” throughout the scene, their appearance modified by randomizing and spacing functions.

The artist thanks 3-D visualization and modeling specialist Sky Asay for his technical assistance in creating the image.

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